Mr. Seward to Mr. Adams.
Sir: I have received your despatch of the 18th of November, (No. 817, ) together With the papers therein mentioned, namely, a copy of a letter which Was addressed to you on the 12th of November last by Lord Wharncliffe, and a copy of your answer to that letter.
Your proceeding in the matter is approved. You will now inform Lord Wharncliffe that permission for an agent of the committee described by him to visit the insurgents detained in the military prisons of the United States and to distribute among them seventeen thousand pounds of British gold is disallowed. Here it is expected that your correspondence with Lord Wharncliffe will end. That correspondence will necessarily become public. On reading it the American people will be well aware that while the United States have ample [Page 368] means for the support of prisoners, as well as for every other exigency of the war in which they are engaged, the insurgents, who have blindly rushed into that condition, are suffering no privations that appeal for relief to charity either at home or abroad.
The American people will be likely also to reflect that the sum thus insidiously tendered in the name of humanity constitutes no large portion of the profits which its contributors may be justly supposed to have derived from the insurgents by exchanging with them arms and munitions of war for the coveted productions of immoral and enervating slave-labor. Nor will any portion of the American people be disposed to regard the sum thus ostentatiously offered for the relief of captured insurgents as a too generous equivalent for the devastation and desolation which a civil war, promoted and protracted by British subjects, has spread throughout States which before were eminently prosperous and happy.
Finally, in view of this last officious intervention in our domestic affairs, the American people can hardly fail to recall the warning of the Father of our Country, directed against two great and intimately connected public dangers, namely, sectional faction and foreign intrigue. I do not think that the insurgents have become debased, although they have sadly wandered from the ways of loyalty and patriotism. I think that, in common with all our countrymen, they will rejoice in being saved by their considerate and loyal government from the grave insult which Lord Whamcliffe and his associates, in their zeal for the overthrow of the United States, have prepared for the victims of this unnecessary, unnatural, and hopeless rebellion.
I am, sir, your obedient servant,
Charles Francis Adams, Esq., &c., &c., &c.